Description
Book SynopsisArgues that Saint Jerome was the first to represent biblical study as a mode of asceticism appropriate for an inhabitant of a Christian monastery, thus pioneering the enduring linkage of monastic identities and institutions with scholarship.
Trade Review"A fascinating study, which provides a series of striking insights into the career of one of the most colorful and influential figures in Christian antiquity. Jerome's Latin Bible would become the foundational text for the intellectual development of the West, providing words for the deepest aspirations and most intensely held convictions of an entire civilization. Williams's book does much to illumine the circumstances in which that fundamental text was produced, and reminds us that great ideas, like great people, have particular origins, and their own complex settings." (Eamon Duffy, New York Review of Books) "Williams has written a provocative book, for it encourages us to look behind Jerome's rather difficult and oft-studied personal and theological conflicts with his contemporaries to view him in the light of his importance in the history of late-antique education and book culture." (Michele Renee Salzman, Speculum)"
